A Veteran Speaks Out On Afghanistan

Matthew Hoh is neither a right-wing hawk or a left-wing peacenik, and he is certainly not a pundit speaking about the war from the safety of a Washington office. He is a former Marine captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq. After leaving the Marines, he signed on as a State Department Foreign Service officer.

But Mr. Hoh is not a fan of current United States policy in Afghanistan. On September 10th, he resigned his position in the Foreign Service as a protest to that policy, which he called a "cavalier, politically expedient and pollyannaish misadventure." Here are some of his feelings about his resignation and the war in Afghanistan:

"I've had a lot of Afghan-Americans contact me and say, 'Matt, you get it.' You understand -- yes, there is a civil war going on. You understand how Afghan society works. You understand this split within the Pashtuns. You understand valley-ism, or whatever you want to call it."

"I have received many many e-mails from active-duty military and some guys who just separated from the service. Some guys are here in the States. I've gotten many e-mails from guys in Afghanistan. Some are people I know. But a lot are people I do not know. Men and women who are saying, 'Thanks for doing this. Keep it up. We don't know why we're here. We're not sure why we're taking these casualties. We don't know what it's accomplishing.'"

"I fail to see the value or worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war."

"I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them. Not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Queda, not because of any fundamental hatred towards the West. The only reason they're fighting us is because we're occupying them."

"In Iraq, even though it was stuck in the '80s, it had infrastructure, it had human capital. It had doctors and lawyers and educators. And they had an established system of government, they had an infrastructure we could build on. Afghanistan has none of that."

"I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan."

"Increasing troops is only going to fuel insurgency. We need to stop our combat operations in areas where we are fighting people only because they are fighting us. Otherwise, it's going to be 2013, we're going to look back four years and we're going to say, "What did we accomplish? What did we get? What was this worth? What did we get out of this?"